I. Mona Lisa and the Wheelbarrow HE two great riddles of the world to-day are machinery and woman. They are two unsolved questions which must be solved: and the answers may be, for all we know, tragic. Meanwhile, we bend our intelligences to the task of discovering what they can mean-what they should mean-to the world. In them lie hidden the possibilities of failure or happiness for the human What the future will be, depends on these two things-machinery and women. race. Of these riddles, a famous painting and a familiar tool may serve us for the moment as symbols. The appropriateness of the first is obvious enough. It is no accident that the Mona Lisa is the most talked-about painting in the world. Walter Pater was not the first, nor the mad Italian who ravished her away the last, to see a mystery in her smile. Nor has the world been fooled into seeing a mystery where the painter only put a mouth. The period out of which the Mona Lisa came was interested in meanings no less than in mouths. The Renaissance was a period of desperate imaginative inquiry. Men painted what they thought as well as what they saw. And Leonardo da Vinci, the most desperate imaginative inquirer of all the Renaissance, may well be supposed to have put into his four years' work on that painting what four centuries have found there. Mona Lisa is not a woman: she is Woman. And that eternal baffling smile is the same which confronts us to-day when we turn to her in hope and fear. But though the Mona Lisa may easily be assumed to symbolize for us the whole problem for which in the last few years we have invented the term "feminism," the other symbol may seem obscure. A plough might as well have suggested that power which man has unloosed upon the world and upon himself that power which, having left the hands of man, goes on as of itself, an endlessly evolving force, a thing half angel and half fiend. A plough would have been as appropriate-but I do not know who invented the plough, and I do know who made the first wheelbarrow. It was the same painted the Mona Lisa. man that This was perhaps no accidental coincidence. You may regard a wheelbarrow as a simple device that anyone would have thought of. But the Pyramids were raised without its aid. The captive Hebrews carted their bricks-without-straw and never dreamed of such a thing to ease their labours. |